There is a moment at the very start of ‘Laughter in Summer’ where Beverly Glenn-Copeland counts in — “1, 2, 3… 1, 2, 3” — before the first note sounds. It is a small thing, barely a gesture, and yet it carries the whole weight of the album in it: a man marshalling himself, marking time, insisting on presence. That is what this record is about, and it is devastating in the best possible way.
Glenn-Copeland has been living with LATE — a form of dementia — and the nine-song album, released February 6 via Transgressive Records, grew out of material he and his wife Elizabeth Glenn-Copeland had been performing on what became his final tour. The original intention was not to make a new album at all. In 2024, before a Montreal performance, they were invited to spend a few days recording alongside producer and engineer Howard Bilerman — best known for his work with Godspeed You! Black Emperor — at Hotel2Tango. They simply captured what they had. Most tracks were recorded in a single take. The closing song, “Let Us Dance (Movement Two),” was the very first time it had ever been performed with the assembled choir — what you hear on the record is the rehearsal that happened as the engineers were setting mic levels.
That choir is worth naming. Pianist and music director Alex Samaras, who also sings, assembled a group that includes Montreal singer-songwriter Helena Deland alongside Camille Deléan, Eugénie Jobin, Robin Love, Mara Nesrallah, Frédérique Roy, Alanna Stuart, and Adèle Trottier-Rivard. Naomi McCarroll-Butler plays clarinet and whistles. The instrumentation is spare to the point of austerity — piano, voice, the faintest touches of wind and breath — but there is nothing thin about the sound. It fills a room the way candlelight fills a room: softly, completely.
Elizabeth Glenn-Copeland is not a supporting player here. She is credited as co-producer of the album alongside Bilerman and music director Alex Samaras, and her presence shapes every aspect of the record. She takes the lead or duets on several tracks — among them “Laughter in Summer,” “Children’s Anthem,” “Harbour,” and “Middle Island Lament” — and her steadier voice becomes a kind of anchor for Glenn’s, which carries what Uncut called a “time-worn delicacy.” “Harbour,” originally a near-jazz ballad from 2023’s ‘The Ones Ahead,’ is transformed into something brighter and more openly loving when the two voices intertwine. “Middle Island Lament” reaches toward the painful history of immigration on Canada’s East Coast, where the couple lived for years. The title track itself was born almost by accident: as Glenn-Copeland’s executive functioning diminished, he began composing a series of instrumentals he called “Songs with No Words.” One day he played one for Elizabeth by a lake. The words rose up in her: “Laughter in summer / How I remember” — a gift, as the press notes put it, as if from the loons themselves.
For anyone who came to Glenn-Copeland through the 2017 reissue of ‘Keyboard Fantasies’ — the 1986 cassette-only synth record that became one of the more unlikely cult rediscoveries of the last decade — this album will feel like a full circle. “Ever New” and “Let Us Dance” both appear here, stripped of their synthesizers and rebuilt around piano and choir. “Children’s Anthem” is described as a revisitation of “Ever New” in a new form. The album is not a greatest-hits exercise, though. It is something more specific: a document of what remains when everything extraneous has been cleared away. Pitchfork called it “a portrait of the artist in his last act: confident, generous, and unafraid.” That reads right.
What makes ‘Laughter in Summer’ linger is not its sadness — it is genuinely not a sad record, even if the circumstances surrounding it are — but its insistence on joy as a deliberate act. Glenn-Copeland has spent five decades making music that resists easy categorization, moving from folk and jazz in the early seventies through experimental synth-wave and into whatever you’d call this: pastoral, piano-heavy, hymn-like without belonging to any church. The NPR World Cafe feature from late April captured the couple in conversation, holding hands, describing their creative partnership as something divinely inspired. You can hear that in the music. This is what it sounds like when two people have been paying attention to each other for decades and decide to write it all down before the light changes.
